Rewind: Waltz with Bashir

I started a new tradition last year, in which I make myself a little syllabus of movies that I want to finally get to over the course of the year. Last year, it was "24 for '24." Now I'm working through my "25 for '25." This is a way to help myself hone in on some blind spots. A lot of canon-type stuff, yes, but also just some things I've been meaning to watch and want to finally get around to. (I also purposefully put on some really long movies, since it can be hard to otherwise find three or four hours to watch a plus-lengthed movie.)

This year, one of the animated movies on my list is Waltz with Bashir. It's loomed large in my imagination for many years. Its performance during awards season when it came out put it on my radar, but living in rural Ohio meant I wasn't destined to see it on the big screen. At some point, I got it on DVD but I never got around to watching it. Not really for any particular reason. I think maybe it felt major, and thus I felt scared to watch it, like I wanted to make sure I was in the right mood/headspace. I get that way about movies sometimes. Make them more daunting in my head than they actually are. Reverence keeping me from lifting my eyes. Something like that.


But I finally watched it today, and it was a really interesting experience. I felt, in some ways, like I was watching two movies at once: the movie I would've seen had I watched this back in 2008 and the movie I was watching now, with my 2024 eyes. I think if I had seen this back in high school, I would've been in love with it. I remember being fascinated by it simply because it felt so different than any other animated movie I was aware of or had seen at the time: mature, strange-looking, dealing with real-world horrors. It was probably the first animated documentary I was ever aware of, and I think it helped to set the stage for the surge of animated docs we're now in, stuff like Flee, Eternal Spring, and Pelikan Blue.

Watching it now, I still appreciate its significance in the medium, and in the documentary genre. This was probably the most significant movie of the past twenty years I hadn't seen, so I'm happy to have finally caught up to it. Maybe the animation hasn't aged particularly well (some of it still looks pretty striking, though), but I think the film has held up decently.

Waltz with Bashir finds writer-director-producer-subject Ari Folman grappling with the events of the 1982 Lebanon War, specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut. Folman doesn't remember what he did there, but his memory starts to return as he meets with various friends and former comrades who recount their memories and experiences of the war. The film doesn't feel too much like a typical documentary for its first hour or so. The structure almost feels like Citizen Kane, pieces of the story coming together from various viewpoints, the bigger picture coming into clearer focus. The whole time, the massacre looms large overhead. It's mentioned early on but ends up being the final destination of the film. Because the details of the war aren't really the focus, it's sometimes a little hard to know exactly where we are, or why, but that isn't necessarily to the film's detriment. Instead, it makes it feel a bit more grounded in the personal rather than the political (which we'll get to), more about the subjective experiences of these soldiers than the larger war.

But, this being a movie about the IDF, it becomes a bit more complicated to parse. Again, this is where I could see the movie as two. If I was watching this with the more ignorant eyes of a teenager in Ohio, I would've accepted this blindly, believed what I was being told, laid my sympathies where the film wanted me to. Now, I find those sympathies complicated by my larger understanding of Israel as a country, a colonizer, a committer of genocide. The film depicts the IDF as a force going in to find Palestinian terrorists who are hiding in Lebanon, and then as regretful onlookers as Christian Phalangist forces start slaughtering Palestinian women and children who are living in refugee camps.

Maybe this is accurate to what happened there, or to these soldiers' experiences, but it's hard to square when we know that Israel has carried out its own atrocities against Palestinians at large for decades and decades, and are currently waging perhaps the most extreme genocidal campaign of their existence. It's one of those things where I have to wonder how much we can trust our narrators, how much of what they're saying is true, how much of it they themselves believe. It's certainly a reminder that every documentary has to be watched with a grain of salt -- even those that feel objective are still the product of a subjective filmmaker, and can't eve reach true objectivity.

But I will say, the way the film empathizes with the victims of the massacre felt genuine, at least. While Folman tries to understand why his memory is failing him, an expert explains to him how some people dissociate from the tragic events around them. It made me think about the way we blithely take in images of war and terror, disaster and tragedy, watching them on our social media like they're movies. Maybe we're moved in a way that means something, but I think most of the time we're just consuming the images without them ultimately meaning anything. 


This expert talks about a soldier who tried to view his military experience in Lebanon as a day trip, or a film. He could recontextualize the horrific images around him as exciting scenes from a military movie, removing himself from the horror by watching through a "camera." It's a nifty trick, but one that couldn't last. Eventually, seeing a bunch of horses that were maimed and killed "broke" this camera (very human, that), and he could no longer shield himself from the horrible things around him.

Similarly, the animation in Waltz with Bashir feels like Folman's camera to help distance himself from these memories, from the part he might have played in committing terrible acts. And finally, in the film's final moments, his camera breaks, too. We see real images of the aftermath of Sabra and Shatila, women mourning in the streets, piles of bodies in the alleys, so much violence. It's an artistic decision that really packs a punch, and one that honors the innocent lives lost. It helped this to go down pretty well, overall, even if I still felt some unease watching it and engaging with it where it was, where it came from.

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